In Adbhut. Marvellous Creatures of Indian Myth and Folklore, Meena Arora Nayak presents a selection of fifty-five magical and monstrous creatures from the myths and folklore of India's various cultures. Divided into five sections, this book portrays familiar and unfamiliar beings that fly across stormy skies, swim in deep seas, burrow through the earth, tread softly on land, and live between these realms, sometimes even breathing fire.
Adbhut hides within its pages creatures that are mysterious, terrible, and terrifying, yet fascinating and irresistible. These fantastical beings include the Manipuri python guardian god, Pakhangpa; Garuda, the king of birds; the immortal Kurma, the tortoise; Mahisa, the Buffalo King: Leviathan, the gigantic sea monster; Shamir, the Judaic stone-cutting worm; the Zoroastrian cosmic dragon, Azhi Dahaka; Nachash, the crafty serpent in the Garden of Eden; the shining Islamic al-Buraq: and the Harappan chimera whose origins remain a mystery.
Meena Arora Nayak is a professor of English and Mythology. She is the author of the novels A Dust Storm in Delhi, Endless Rain, About Daddy, and In the Aftermath, as well as The Puffin Book of Legendary Lives, Evil in the Mahabharata, The Blue Lotus: Myths and Folktales of India, and The Kathasaritsagara of Somadeva.
Mysterium tremendum et fascinans! Mysterious, terrible, and terrifying, yet fascinating and irresistible! This is how the twentieth century theologian, Rudolf Otto, characterizes the holy. Fantastical creatures, too, can be described similarly. They are magical and marvellous, oftentimes, beautiful, and, sometimes, monstrous; but, even in their monstrousness, they are fascinating and compelling.
The image that comes to mind when one thinks of a fantastical creature is of a chimeric amalgam fashioned in the imaginative mind of mythmakers and folklorists, or of a preternatural being whose physical form is almost impossible to imagine. However, the quality of fantasticality cannot be based only in the single dimension of the physical plane; these creatures are also fantastic because of what they signify. Metaphors, paradigms, histories, beliefs, and cultural ethos are all encapsulated in their being. Hence, even commonplace, everyday animals of the real world become marvellous when invested with this affluence.
In medieval Europe, naturalists and mystics, captivated by the natural history of animals, sought a divine connection through them. Consequently, there was a trend of compiling compendiums of fantastic creatures. Following the example of the encyclopedic Naturalis Historia of Pliny the Elder and the Greek didactic text, Physiologus, these texts started a genre of bestiary that elucidated Christian morality through anecdotal fables about beasts and birds. These beings were not only depicted with extravagant details, they were also given allegorical meanings. For example, the unicorn was perceived as the purity of Christ, the Phoenix as Jesus's resurrection, and the fire-breathing dragon represented the Devil. The animals included in these texts were both exotic, such as lions and tigers, and imaginary, such as unicorns, griffins, and dragons. Also, many manuscripts, like the Aberdeen Bestiary, were lavishly illuminated.
By the end of the medieval period, Christian bestiaries were no longer trending. The convention, however, continues till today in different genres: moralistic tales for children, literary writings in the style of Jorge Luis Borges's The Book of Imaginary Beings, and monster compendiums for role- playing games (RPGs) of popular culture.
In India, the tradition of animal lore is, at least, as old as Panchatantra, whose oldest extant version is dated to about 200 BCE. However, there is no specific heritage of anthologizing fantastical creatures, as in the bestiaries. Perhaps, this is because in the myth and folklore of India, birds and animals have always been more than just allegories or symbols of religiosity. They are part of cosmogonies and cosmographies and are integral to the very flux of cultural norms. They delineate relationships of the human and divine; they encase archetypes and actuate behaviours; their references are part of the idiom, and their metaphors not only bridge myth and folklore but also communities. They can be therianthropic (part beast, part human) or wholly zoomorphic (animal). They can be vehicles of gods, or gods themselves.
Book's Contents and Sample Pages
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